Composer/artist Ryoji Ikeda has been on a roll lately, mounting massive immersive audiovisual experiences. His aesthetic talent, in crisp blacks and whites and SONAR-like pings above oceans of glitching noise, is in spinning operettas of data. The latest project, which closed at the start of this month at Berlin’s Kraftwerk, pulled apart the data from […]

Today, I’m in London doing a hands-on workshop on visual metaphors for music, and covering various topics filed under “synesthesia” at Music Tech Fest. It seems appropriate, with the subject matter on the brain, to revisit the topic of visuals and music in a series of posts. When you make hardware, with knobs and faders, […]

With multi-touch fully exploited and the basics of camera vision largely understood, interaction moves to the realm of free space, “augmenting” your world with gestures that find some physical connection. They surprise by working in some way that seems intuitive and natural, somewhere away from what seems to be the realm of the computer. And […]

In moments that would have pleased Belgian surrealist René Magritte, an ordinary paint roller transforms a litany of European landmarks with video “paint.” Roll on, and it’s as though someone has punched a hole to another dimension. This isn’t a post-production effect: it’s all live, via computer vision and projection mapping. The project is the […]

Speaking of mechanical motion and machine drawing, in the work of Robert Howsare, vintage equipment becomes part kinetic sculpture, part machine artist. In “Drawing Apparatus,” two turntables become a generative geometric drawing machine, Spirograph-style. (See some really lovely-looking renders by this machine on the artwork project page. Via Today and Tomorrow, hat tip to portable.tv […]

What happens when an Albrecht Dürer masterpiece meets CNC? Watch the video above to see. The work of Pittsburgh-based Pablo Garcia, who does collaborative, trans-media work and teaches at Carnegie Mellon, the project nods both to art history and the world of robotics – and it’s just one of Garcia’s works to do so.

What happens when an Albrecht Dürer masterpiece meets CNC? Watch the video above to see. The work of Pittsburgh-based Pablo Garcia, who does collaborative, trans-media work and teaches at Carnegie Mellon, the project nods both to art history and the world of robotics – and it’s just one of Garcia’s works to do so.

Mapping projections to architecture, and connecting music to visual metaphors are nothing new. But many of these projects leave the control to performers; audience members simply stand back and watch. In a project for HP promoting their TouchSmart PCs, interactive artists ceded that control to participants. Instead of the computers being in the hands of […]

Faith in fiction: our friend, virtual magician Marco Tempest, is back with another must-watch, dazzling effects-laden soliloquy. There’s plenty of sparkling eye candy, but as is often the case with Marco’s work, the content behind the effects delves into the philosophy of what magic, theater, and fiction itself really mean. The message is timely. Rooted […]

It’s not just projection mapping on buildings as a cool gimmick any more. Live visuals increasingly means adapting to spaces, using multiple outputs and multiple projectors, tailoring your visuals to irregular surfaces and integrating them with environments. It’s projection, but it’s also dealing with LED walls. And flexible output isn’t just something expected of high-end […]